Stands alongside Under Milk Wood: Shedding a Skin, at Soho Theatre, reviewed

Shedding a Skin opens with an office nightmare. Myah is a mixed-race employee in a predominantly white firm who gets summoned to the boss’s room for a group photo. The only other workers present are black and they greet each other with the ‘black nod’ as she calls it. And the group includes a black cleaner dressed in a suit to ‘bump up the numbers’. She tells the boss that this attempt to promote racial harmony simply instils mistrust and division but she gets sacked for rebelling against the firm’s ‘fakery’. Next, her layabout boyfriend, a musician who lives on a barge, gives her the elbow. Now she’s homeless, jobless and single. A great start. The viewer is immediately engaged with the efforts of this sparky, intelligent character to rebuild her ruined life.

She moves in with an elderly lesbian from Jamaica, Mildred, who keeps her flat spotless and insists that Myah goes clubbing every weekend to find a boyfriend. The wise and indomitable Mildred seems too good to be true. She forces Myah to reveal the cost of every item bought from the organic grocer’s and she cackles with sardonic, grannyish laughter when she learns how badly they overcharge their customers. Myah hears that Mildred has attacked three public school boys who were bullying a tramp near her council flat. She floored all three – bish, bash, bosh – by clobbering them over the skull with her handbag. She’s 79. Could that happen? Probably not but the tale has enough charm to suppress one’s scepticism.

Oddly, the play embodies the scourge it hopes to tackle. The racism crisis that has emerged in Britain over the past two years has made Myah’s life miserable. Being mixed-race, she feels too white among black people and too black among white people.